


there is none beside thee.

by peonies



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 04:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11751918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peonies/pseuds/peonies
Summary: In the first days of May, he can feel the Maginot Line tightening like a noose around his neck. (He goes from Sandhurst to Belgium to a wreck in the English Channel.)





	there is none beside thee.

**Author's Note:**

> Please expect - and excuse - factual errors regarding troop movement, French geography, anything to do with the logistics of travel, British English Received orthography and grammar, and/or animal handling.
> 
> *** A potential trigger warning is the contemplation of death, but as a situational threat rather than a course of action; another is body horror due to disfigurement and loss of limbs, but those moments aren't described in any detail.

In the first days of May, he can feel the Maginot Line tightening like a noose around his neck. It happens quickly: the Germans push them back over the Dyle, then rout them at Arras, forcing them to retreat again and again under heavy fire. The regiment bleeds men all over the French countryside and none of the officers seems able to do anything to staunch the wound. They limp from one empty farmstead to another, shedding the wounded onto ambulances - or, if they succumb to their injuries, into shallow graves.

By the time they reach Douay, the platoon has been without a lieutenant for two weeks and without a captain for six days. He is the only liaison between Major Wells and the remaining men until they are re-assigned and urged on toward Dunkirk. All he can do in the short time they’re given to re-group is negotiate for supplies, keeping them clothed and fed and warm for a few days before they load into the carriers. The men find smokes on their own, and he listens to their conversation go around and around in circles late at night as he twists his wedding band on his finger, poring over a map of the Opal Coast by flickering lamplight.

 _Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk,_ Poole says. _Dunkirk! You can practically fucking see Dover from there, I reckon. Where are you from, sir? Surrey, you said?_

He looks up in surprise. _Yes, Surrey._

Poole laughs, short and bitter. _Close enough. Think you could show us the way across the Channel?_

 _Not with you on my fucking back, Corporal. I saw your stroke in the Andelle and I’d rather be strapped to a Panzer._ That earns a few hoots. He tries to keep his tone jovial. _I’m not particularly interested in desertion, anyway._

 _Yes, sir,_ he says, unsmiling. _We’ve got a bloody big war to fight, haven’t we?_

The embers of their cigarettes float in the night like buoys on a black ocean.

They leave early the next morning, thousands of men packed into the personnel carriers like tall khaki sardines. He confers with their new captain to review their movement up to the coast, then returns to his men to oversee their packing. The new lieutenant, Chappell, boards first with the driver, and the rest of them file into the bed with little complaint. He conducts a final head-count before the company begins to move - then, confused, counts again. _Ackerman, Ayers, Bennett, Black…_

None of the men say a word, and he doesn’t ask them anything, because he knows why they are silent; looking back into the crowd of refugees and officers, he searches for the deserter’s face. He cannot find it, but rather remembers something else: Poole wide-eyed at Sedan, searching desperately for an ambulance, and Marshall’s corpse in his arms, full of shrapnel, still warm.

Whitcomb and Jones watch him as he takes his seat.

_Everything all right, sir?_

He doesn’t answer. A light rain begins to fall as the trucks roll north to Dunkirk.

 

 

The sun is still shining when he reaches the sand, the heat of it burning through the back of his uniform as he retreats from the city alone. He staggers up a dune, which starts to give way under his feet, and surveys the long, meandering queues of men trailing into the sea like great black worms, almost indistinguishable in the haze of smoke. Then he turns back and watches for British soldiers coming down onto the beaches from the city. The bombardment continues. It sounds and feels just like thunder.

None of his men emerge. They may all be dead, or simply separated. There is no way to know for sure unless he can find them. He takes a deep, shuddering breath. The air smells like brine and chemical smoke, sticking to the insides of his lungs. Turning to face the sea again, he collapses on the crest of the dune, the grit of sand beginning to creep into his boots.

 _All gone._ The thought drives the air from his lungs and he bows his head until it rests on his knees. Goes over his roster again, trying to remember who is dead and who is missing. _Ackerman, Ayers, Bennett, Black, Crenshaw, Darby, Darwin, Elgin, Gamson, Geller, Greene…_

A small group of officers picks him up sometime later as he sits there, exhausted, head in his hands. By the pips on his epaulette, the man who comes up to him is a captain, grey and worn. By his dialect, he’s a Mancunian. He stands up and salutes. The captain gestures to his shoulder.

_Second lieutenant - what corps?_

_Three, sir,_ he rasps. _Home Counties Infantry._

_And your platoon commander?_

Chappell has been dead for a while. _I’m the commander, sir. Since Arras._ Although, truthfully, since Sedan.

The captain gives him another once-over. There’s something in his eyes, though carefully guarded. _Your men?_

He looks over his shoulder at the smoking ruins of Dunkirk, and his mind goes blank. When he turns back to the captain, there’s a hand on his shoulder.

 _We need you down there._ He gestures to the queues formed along the beach. _There have been some disciplinary problems. I’d be grateful for the help._

 _I…_ He looks back again, hears the distant rumble of

a detonation -

and feels his chest constrict, painfully tight. _I’ve got to find them._

_If they’re alive, they’ll know to come here. But there are more than three hundred thousand men on this beach that need to get home, son, and more coming._

_Sir,_ he says, and walks on with them, brushing the damp sand from his uniform. The sky is too bright - cloudless. It gapes open, like a mouth, and the bombs begin to hit the beach within the hour.

 

 

There’s a pack mule sitting in the dunes. A soldier has his hand on the mule’s brown neck as it buries its nose in a feedbag.

 _They told us we would have to leave them here,_ the soldier says softly in accented English, not meeting his gaze. _Poor thing._

He doesn’t say anything, but sits down on the creature’s other side a bit farther back, rests a hand tentatively on its flank.

_Are you an officer?_

_I am._

_Do you know if they’re going to leave us behind, too?_ The soldier is looking back at him now with dark, cautious eyes, almost afraid. His helmet rests on his lap, and he pushes his fingers through curls of black hair flecked with sand.

_You’re with the muleteers?_

_Yes, sir. Twenty-Second Animal Transport Company. Lance-Naik Minhas._ Minhas pauses, expecting a name in return.

 _I don’t know._ He remembers the lights of their cigarettes in Douay.

_We aren’t French. By all rights, we’re British, too._

_The Navy can’t take all of us. English, Indian, French… we’re just too many._

_But they’ll take you first, won’t they? There’s an order to these things._ He sounds bitter.

They lapse into silence, and Minhas lowers his gaze, stroking the mule’s neck and ears. It lays its head on the sand defeatedly when the feed bag is empty.

_How many of them are there? Here? The mules, I mean._

_Four companies’ worth._

_I thought I would have heard them braying._ Instead, waves and bombs.

 _They have had their voice -_  he gestures to his neck and makes a slashing motion. _So they won’t draw attention._ He sounds bitter. _It doesn’t matter now._

He looks more closely at its neck, sees a faint scar, the muscles in its neck moving as it shakes off flies.

_So it can’t talk?_

_No._ Minhas un-hitches the feed bag and tosses it aside. The mule snorts with its white nose, and it shakes its head again, long ears twitching. _Colonel Hart thinks we ought to shoot them all if we leave. So the Germans can’t have them. I think they might shoot them all anyway._ He bites his lip.

_You’ve taken good care of her. She doesn’t seem scared._

_She should be,_ he murmurs.

He studies the soldier’s face. _Are you?_

 _Of course,_ Minhas replies, shaking his head. _What about you?_

 _I don’t know,_ he says. _Maybe I should be._

 

 

Poole was wrong. He can hardly see the ships coming in from the water, much less the white cliffs at the edge of home.

He survives altogether too many times. Time enough for the men around him to know his face, and time enough for him to organise them. At first he has them digging graves, but the bombs keep coming and the bodies pile up too quickly. Too many, too fast; the Stukas and the Heinkels, the laughter of artillery, the Panzers behind, the mines in the sea. Naval craft slink around the line of the horizon, receiving mere handfuls of men at a time in small boats.

Britain is leaving them, they know now. The Navy cannot approach the shore under constant threat of destruction, cannot send enough ships to save four hundred thousand without abandoning posts elsewhere. And still the bombs come. Still they fall to the ground and pray they stay whole.

He and the other men sleep in the dunes at night beyond the reach of German artillery, hidden from the Luftwaffe in the shoreside darkness. Louder than the distant rumbling in the city, or the hypnotic crash of waves on the shore, he can hear someone gasping for breath.

 _Hayes - wake up -_ someone, maybe one of his friends, shakes him by the shoulder.

He can see in the scattered moonlight that the boy’s eyes are open, glassy, unseeing.

 _Leave him be,_ he says quietly. _Nightmares. He’ll be fine._

The other boy looks up at him, a suggestion of scepticism in his exhausted face, and then reluctantly turns over, sand shifting beneath him. Hayes’s chest heaves in jerky, sporadic movements, growing increasingly irregular and then stopping altogether. For a moment, he thinks the boy might be dying after all, almost reaches out to shake his other shoulder, but he is at the edge of sleep and and wonders if this would be better for Hayes than having his legs blown off on some anonymous French battleground.

But then he hears him groan and prop himself up on his elbows, sitting up for a few moments before presumably realizing he’s still in hell.

All of them wake up the next morning. He stares at the sky, which has lightened to the dull, dirty colour of dishwater, and blinks the grit from his eyes wearily. He is the last to stand up.

 

 

There’s a destroyer going out and he can’t, they can’t just watch it leave, not without trying. Not tonight. He secretly commissions the rowboats salvaged from the shelled-out docks, and he has to organize them quickly during last light. _Come on, come on. On the oars. Those lights - head for those lights. Ayers, at the front. Quickly._

There’s a quiet desperation in the pull of the oars. He can hear them struggling in the odd silence of dusk, shouts to the boats around them. All he can think of is the spire of the church, the ringing of the bell. Birds singing. He can almost hear them.

They capsize near the shore when they’re hit by a breaker. They can’t turn in time, carrying too many men, and slice halfway up the crest before the boat flips. There’s almost no light. He is lucky enough to surface quickly, and spits seawater as he clings to the prow. He told them what to do before they boarded, but in the near-absolute darkness they panic and flounder, knowing that there is nothing beneath them but death. He can hardly get a word in around the waves battering them to and fro, and the water squeezing the air from his lungs. There’s no talking, now - instead, he lets go and swims to the nearest man. In the next little eternity he’s sure once or twice that he’s drowned, but he hauls him back. He can see his motley crew kicking around the boat.

 _We’re going to flip it over,_ he yells hoarsely, as soon as he sees enough of them around. _Grab the bloody edge - the fucking - on my mark, right, three - two - one -_

It lurches beneath them but only moves through the waves.

_Harder, god dammit! Again - three - two - one - fucking pull!_

They surge forward again, shouting, and he can feel it come up, strains and thrashes against the water and bruises his ribs on the hull, and all in one motion the boat flips over. They cheer and he bellows at them to get on, one on each side, clings one-handed to the prow and counts (Ackerman, Ayers, Bennett, Black). No one missing. Good. His boots hit the planks with a splash, but some men are already bailing it out, and most of the oars have been salvaged. He wipes his hair out of his stinging eyes, squinting against the darkness for the lights of the destroyer.

There. It hasn’t started to move yet. They can still make good time. His heart rings in his chest. Not one more scream. Air to breathe. Alive. The softness of grass.

They get close. So close. They capsize again and barely manage to get the boat back on its belly. He can’t quite see if he’s lost anyone, but the shouts that he hears might as well have been from the other boats. They can’t see anything until they head into the destroyer’s wake, where the lights from its deck illuminate the water around them. And they beg.

Then a white line of foam. Then a thousand tonnes of steel and an entire crew lost to the water, forever. Then men bobbing in the water, screaming for help, life-jackets wrapped around their necks. He stands above them like a judge or a fisherman knowing that he has to leave them behind or kill more of them when they sink on the journey back. And now they know there’s a U-Boat prowling these waters, hunting their carriers with torpedoes.

He makes promises to them - _we’ll come back for you -_ and doesn’t even know if he’s lying. But they turn around and leave them behind. The pathetic little fleet reaches the shore at daybreak and the men pile off the boats. There’s no way to know where the survivors are now unless they’ve stayed close to the wreckage of the destroyer.

_What have you done?_

_There’s men,_ he mutters. _Men in the water. I - we_

_didn’t have room in the boats…_

_What have you done?_

He looks up

into Lieutenant Wycliffe’s face, or

what remains of it after he was hit by

the shell,

and shivers in his damp uniform.

Then he blinks, and

no one is there.

 

 

The captain says that he

will probably make it aboard

the next ship.

It occurs to him that they

haven’t faced a bombardment in

the last few days.

No

Luftwaffe.

_Halt order._

Hardtack crumbling bitter like cinders between his teeth.

The captain looked him in the eye the day after he returned from chasing the destroyer and

didn’t look angry, not really, just

just

tired -

Captain Baines, cut on his cheek from shrapnel, carbine doesn’t work, canteen at his side, caravan of carriers posted, commands coming through the radio - and the captain corrects, cajoles, carries the weight of the Corps of Engineers, of the core, of the corpse -

presses his palms to his eyes, breathes -

_Ackerman Ayers Bennett Black Crenshaw Darby Darwin -_

_\- Elgin Gamson Geller Greene Harrison Hendricks Holly Jones-Arthur Jones-Richard Kilgore Marshall Mayweather Newman Perkins Poole -_

_\- Reid Rollins Smith-Oliver Smith-Thomas Teller Wainwright Whitcomb Yates -_

corpse.

_The first time. In Belgium. I looked him in the eye before I put the bullet in his neck._

_Yes,_ Captain Baines says, voice soft and worn. Can’t be more than forty years old. _Yes, you wish sometimes they weren’t people. Not like your men._

_I lost them all._

_These are your men._ He sweeps his arm out, gesturing to the shoreline and the hundreds of thousands on it. _Many of them have had only you to depend on._

He grits his teeth. Ackerman, Ayers, Bennett, Black.

 _Stand up,_ comes the soft command. _For God and country, stand up, soldier._

 _The next ship,_ he says desperately.

Captain Baines turns back toward the horizon. _The next ship._

His body creaks and aches as he stands, every bruise protesting. He returns to his men.

 

 

Almost at the stroke of midnight, the HMS Chatham begins to move, splitting the water even-keeled, cutting swift through the darkness. The men are below; the few of them that have ventured out on the waves grip the rails of the deck, and the crewmen don’t ask them to go below with the others.

The water looks sickly green under the lights of the deck, rippling with foam as the Chatham pushes forward. In the distance, getting slowly smaller, fires in the city, lights over the beach. He can’t see the soldiers on the shore anymore, does not strain to make them out. Drops his eyes to the water, closes his eyes, feels the wind strip his face bare and bleeding. His arms shake because he’s gripping the rail so hard, white-knuckled, as if it’ll vanish the moment he lets go.

There are letters he has to write, ledgers to check, reports to assemble, briefings to give, men to mourn, but in his mind, the spray lifted up to his cheeks and lips by the wind is the drizzle of rain on a grey Belgian morning, white roses blooming against a low brick wall, the grid of white mortar and red clay, the April chill settling in his coat. He shakes his head and tries to recall anything else, anything before, but it is as if he can only see them too close, with the wrong colors, like a postcard under a microscope.

After a long while, he steps back, presses the ring to his lips, tries to remember her face, at least, and there’s a memory of her brown hair curling at the white collar of her dress - _no._

He drowns the image and stares at the metal beneath his feet, because she called him brave and he has done nothing but try to run home from the very beginning. He has never had an ounce of courage in him and he cannot imagine the faces of the people at the dock when they arrive except to think that they will know that each of them, to a man, lost France for carelessness.

 _Going home?_ Wycliffe asks, hat in hand. For an instant, he is whole and young again, red-cheeked and grinning gaily, and the sun shines down on them as they stand proudly on the docks at Le Havre, watching the troops unload, the flags on the jackstaff snapping in the breeze. _Going home?_

A shout from the prow, echoed quickly, and he looks up in the moment before a torpedo smashes into the hull of the destroyer with a deafening explosion.

Buckling steel, screeching like a mule, the deck thrashing beneath his boots, the second impact, the third, like fists slamming against a locked door, _they are all down there,_ and muffled screaming that could be human or the sound of collapsing bulkheads, the ship lurching to its side, as if lying down to touch the water almost gently, escape hatches opening, sailors plunging into the water, dead or alive he doesn’t know, the smell of smoke, the pounding of his heart, the shouts of panic and confusion, and he wonders if it’s the same U-Boat, knows for a fact that he is going to die, and leaps from the railing, plunges back into the water and black, oily silence. _The sound death makes._

He looks up after he breaks the surface the first time, sees a figure silhouetted by a light, shouting, gesturing wildly to the men scrambling across the deck.

_We’ll come back for you._

Kicking away from the ship, far enough that he won’t be pulled under, he watches the lights die one by one, watches the men drop to the sea, remembers how many of them flocked on board, hundreds of faces with the same desperation, sees maybe a few dozen escape before the lights go out, soon hears nothing but the groaning of the sinking ship like all the men on earth calling out at once, feels nothing but the water that tosses him back and forth, the insistent upward movement of the life-jacket, and dies until the sun breaks the horizon on the last morning.

 

 

He goes from Sandhurst to Belgium to a wreck in the English Channel. From Camberley to Le Havre to Sedan, then into the endless water.

 

 

The wind

picks up.

He shields his face

with his coat, holding the hem up

to soften the whipcrack

of its pace. His limbs

are stiff and unresponsive.

His fingers feel

swollen. The cold

has numbed

every inch of skin

on his body.

Nothing but

grey cloud -

grey water.

He clambers onto the hull as soon as he can see it. It creaks in the water, and the propeller twitches as the waves slap against it, but it doesn’t seem to move. His stomach wrings itself out and a thin, watery bile drips from his mouth. Salt water and gall.

And then he sees the first corpses.

Some of them are wearing life-jackets and have clearly drowned; some of them aren’t, and some of them are in pieces. They bump quietly against the metal as the sea pushes them up against the wreckage of their ship. A few more drift into his line of sight over the next few hours. The wind whistles as it pushes through the propeller’s teeth.

There are no ships anywhere on the horizon; the water is empty, and the sky is patchy and cold.

He is

alone.

 _Still wearing your tie?_ Wycliffe asks, almost inaudible over the wind and waves. _You’ve always got to look the part, haven’t you?_

The chill sinks into him. He feels himself

going.

 

 

There is nothing anywhere. His eyelashes are heavy with salt and his face and hands are raw.

He takes the hours of daybreak to appreciate just how vast and how wide and how utterly empty the sea is. He remembers the shape of the southern coast of England, the jagged ridge of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. The ribbon of water separating them seemed so slim that it was no wonder so many had tried to swim home. Despair made it look no wider than a river.

 _Ackerman, Ayers, Bennett, Black,_ he counts in his head.

The water around him must be teeming with bodies. They are the only things around, it seems, on the entire earth, and he doubts he would make it very far away from the wreckage, let alone to England. In truth, he doesn’t know what good trying would do. He’s going to die. It might as well be here. He imagines that drowning might even be peaceful.

And yet - he flinches out of each fitful doze in fear that he’ll tumble into the ocean and never wake up. He supposes he’s a coward by nature.

Wycliffe whistles the refrain of “Rule, Britannia” as he cleans his carbine.

He cracks his eyes open and sees an empty life-jacket. Below that, only the darkness of the Channel.

 

 

It’s March. Rain pours down in sheets, churning the soil into mud. The lieutenant is lighting up a cigarette under the tarpaulin rigged up as an extension of the tent behind him. They’re at the far end of the field hospital, which hasn’t seen anything much more serious than broken bones or influenza come through it. He can hear someone coughing loudly from inside every so often. Probably Darby.

 _My father used to tell me stories about the Somme,_ Wycliffe muses, curls of smoke puffing out of his nose and mouth. _Brave, sad stories. He never seemed to know whether to be proud of them._

_You’re proud of him, though._

He grins. _Of course. To me, he was a war hero… But it must seem bizarre to him. I think he feels like he just ran along in the trenches and shot his rifle a few times and got decorated for it. The stories about the gas, the mud, his leg… I think he really was brave._

They’re silent for a while. Wycliffe passes him the pack and he has a smoke, too. Warms up a little, clears his head.

_Looks like I’ll be telling my children about the six months I spent in Belgium with my thumb up my arse. Wonder if they’ll think I’m a war hero, too._

_I’m sure you’ll have plenty of chances to shoot at Germans before your tour’s up._

_Well, let’s hope so. Otherwise it’s just sitting here and hoping Chamberlain convinces Fritz to give Poland back, please and thank you._ Another rattling cough from inside the tent. _Poor Darby. It’s the most action he’s seen all year, fighting the ’flu._

_Think we should give him a medal once he’s back on his feet?_

Wycliffe laughs, throwing the stub of his cigarette to the ground. _I’ll pin the_ _Legion d’Honneur on him myself._

_If he dies because he caught cold, d’you think they’d still call him a war hero back home?_

_Of course. He died on foreign soil in service of his country._

_It’s hardly different than if he was on holiday._

_’Cept he’s had a gun strapped to his back for six months with hostiles nearby. As far as I’m concerned, everyone’s a hero once he’s deployed._

_Even deserters?_

_Well,_ he says slowly, _I suppose not. But there’s always an exception. Doesn’t mean there aren’t heroes-to-be among us. A lot of these men are going to die young if they ever see a real offensive. Some of them are going to die in that tent. Maybe Darby, if he gets to be in a bad way. You look his mum in the eye when this is all over and tell her he wasn’t a war hero, eh?_

_All right, all right. I just don’t think we’ve had a chance to be brave, yet._

_Time will tell,_ Wycliffe says breezily, turning toward the opening of the tent. _Any man who leaves home is brave enough for me._

 

 

He has survived altogether too many times - and this is the last one. He shivers from the cold and from the fear of death, but there is no way he’ll be alive tomorrow, and a quiet resignation wraps itself around his stomach. When he licks his lips, the taste of brine is so strong that it almost makes him retch. _Nor any drop to drink._

Wycliffe wouldn’t have called him a coward, but Wycliffe’s idea of heroism ended in death on the battlefield. He wonders where Poole is, if he’s still slinking around Douay or if he made his way south before the Panzers swept in - if he’s lying dead somewhere beneath a shattered canal or in the long grass of a fallow field. He wonders if Poole will ever go home.

 _Home._ He closes his eyes for one last dream.

They were in Surrey, once, and the air was damp in spring as he walked down the street arm-in-arm, unable to see anything of her face under the brim of her wool cap, only the curl of brown hair against the white collar of her best Sunday dress. Bright peals of laughter. Soft singing. He turns away again.

He hasn’t written home in a while, but they’ll understand once the news reaches Britain; they were running from the Germans, they were being slaughtered even at the beach; the men they sent to war were only boys. They’ll understand if he doesn’t come home.

_Ackerman, Ayers, Bennett, Black, Crenshaw, Darby, Darwin -_

He lets it the Channel have it all, tossing his life-jacket into the wind and waves. The ship groans beneath him one last time.

He waits

and drifts.

 

 

 

Then a shout cracks through the air like a gunshot.

 _Someone calling for you,_ Wycliffe says. _Going home?_

**Author's Note:**

> 1) As little as I know about the British Expeditionary Force, I know even less about the Indian Army and the level of education soldiers would have had access to in British-colonial India. Minhas is referred to as Indian here because Pakistan was declared a sovereign state a few years after the end of the war; he is one of the muleteers from the Indian Army providing animal transport to the BEF who was almost abandoned at Dunkirk. Some information is taken from [this article](http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/AedRPd8e6EvNCWfLMOZVlM/The-further-adventures-of-Dunkirks-Pakistani-Indian-soldier.html), and some from further research.  
> 2) Title is taken from the Reginald Heber hymn "[Holy, Holy, Holy](http://hymnary.org/text/holy_holy_holy_lord_god_almighty_early)."  
> 3) If the Wycliffe parts don't make sense, Cillian Murphy's character has the insignia of a second lieutenant, which seems to indicate that this is his first time in the field as a newly-commissioned officer. Wycliffe would have been the first lieutenant he served under; the parts in Belgium take place during the Phoney War.  
> 4) oh gee this is definitely more than I expected to write and also probably the most challenging as writing characters based on Real People who went through real trauma is highly uncomfortable, but plenty of WWII historical fiction exists I guess? thank you for reading, I hope it was enjoyable!


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